"I know why you've come... they've sent you to bring me back, but that cannot happen.."

Thursday, November 30, 2006

People love talking about crits and seeing where they are on damage meters. But healers, if they are anything like me, don't get that same sense of satisfaction. Who cares if I crit heal for 2400? As the very wise prophet Exe from the WoW priest class forums said "problem is that once healed, warrior gets damaged mroe, and healing must continue".

This poster - well I think he copied it from the EU forums, so I can't give the original poster credit - highlights all the things wrong with the use of healing meters in raids. It has its uses, it can point out who stays afk entire fights sure, but on the other hand it can place added pressure on an already stressful role.

Alot of people have been saying to me how much trouble they have getting in the top heal spots. One person was warned that she may be kicked if she didn't startinghealing more, and get higher on the heal meter. So I decided to produce a guide for these people to help them reach that top healing spot. This guide is currently only for priests.

The objective.Your only purpose is to top the healing charts, whilst maintaing a low overheal %.

Your spells:Power shield : Alot of heal meters don't show this as healing so just ignore it, someone else can shield to stop burst damge, and get their low heal position.

Dispel Magic: Again this is useless let some low heal person waste their time dispelling, if you do it you'll lose ranking.

Res : Useless, but make sure to heal the people who have just been rezzed, they are at like 1 hp so thats alot of potential healing. It might take a bit longer to recover after a wipe, but you'll be higher on the heal ranking so its worth it. If for some reason you are the only res 'er after a wipe left, make sure to res the other res classes last to make sure they dont get a full 99% hp heal bonus from healing the res'd people.

Renew: Spam this like no tomorrow, make sure you have maxed out all talents to increase your renew ability, and always cast your own on top of someone with a weakerrenew, this gives the tank a better healing / tick from renew, and prevents that player from getting ahead of you on the heal meter.

Flash heal: This one is essential for stealing heals from other healers espically druids with their slow heal. In trash pulls and some tank and spank bosses there aren't enough people to heal for the healers, so this means you need to heal first to maintain that #1 healing spot. If you see two people at 80% hp and a druid just starts to heal one, DONT heal the one the druid isn't healing, assist the druid and land a flash heal getting that person to full, then whilst the druid goes ??? and lands an overheal, quickly heal the other players, congrats you just got twice the healing , and your competition (the other healers) got none.

Greater heal: This is good for longer fights to keep your mana up. Getting it talented to a shorter cast is a must to land it before other healers. Dont worry too much about using it for mana conseravtion in trash though, use flash heal to steal heals and make others overheal (this also means they have less mana so they drink more and you get more heals) , the guild bank can always get you more major mana pots to use during trash, but if you dont get a high healing you could lose your officer status or be /gkicked

Fade: This one is quite good for avoiding death, if you see another healer is high on the aggro meter, espically one who has no aggro shedding abilities, run over to them and fade it off onto them, this'll interrupting their healing and give you a target to spam heals on to get more ranking.

Buffs : Inner fire on yourself, get other priests to cast the others on you and other raid members.

DowntimeIf there is downtime perhaps after a wipe, or the raid leader calls a 5 minute break, etc try to find a warlock with an imp and run in and out healing yourself when your hp drops, if possible try to enlist other players so you can use prayer of healing as it will get you more healing much quicker. If you see other healers doing this you must heal them first so they dont get any heal ranking out of it. If for some reason there are no imp warlocks, this is the one exception in which you should cast fortitude on yourself and then heal to get ranking that way.

Healing AssignmentsIf you are in charge of healing assignments then follow this plan to maximize your ranking, if you aren't ignore the assignments and do this plan anywayYou should assign yourself to a tank who will take large amounts of damage constantly, so you can spam your best heals for 100% healing no overheal, with trashassign at most 1 other healer to the main tank and tell the other healers to "spot" heal i.e waste mana with 4 priests healing one person. Once you get to the bossassign your worst healers with the slowest reaction times and lowest heal ranking to help heal the maintanks, if you have good healers with a high healing ranking assign them to dispel/cleanse or if you must, to "spot" healing. This will insure the good healers heal ranking is crippled and you maintain a healthy lead as the best healer.

Special Tips for Certain BossesSnowballs can easily get you some 20 second silences on opossing healers in places like aq20 with kurinaxx, just stand in a blob of people and throw the snowball.When nefarian does the priest call, use prayer of healing and lots of heals to make sure you have plently of targets to heal once the corrupted healing effect ends.If you are a bomb of some sort, run towards the top healers in the healing ranking, this will keep them from overtaking you due to a chance death. (You can say something like whoops sorry my mouse died LOL, if you want to. If anyone complains remind them how you are always #1 healer and hence obviously the most skilled player)

Other Raid Members:Hunter :You can use alot more flash heals to get ranking first without going oom, if you keep nagging the hunter (or whoever is pulling) and tell him to slow down and stop pulling, even if the other healers are at 95% if you keep telling him that the healers are complaining he'll get paranoid and hopefully slow a bit meaning you can steal more heals with flash. It is worth noting your rating will drop if you run out of mana so make sure to moderate how many flash heals you use instead of de ranked greaters. And always remember to keep using those major mana pots every 3 minutes, guild banks have 1000's of gold so it doesnt matter in cost, remember higher heal ranking = better healer.

DruidsYou must get druids to innervate you. It doesn't matter if someone else has more spirit of if you are at 85% mana, more healing = better healer and you want to be the best healer. If you are an officer its quite easy to tell them to innervate you, if not you can claim that priests are better healers with more benefit from spirit, make sure only to mention how much better priests scale if you scale better than them with more spirit. If you have worse equip just be vague about priests better healing bonus and keep pestering them till they give in, alot of people don't understand the mathematics, in this case its quite easy to make up some numbers to prove you should be innervated even if in reality someone else should.

WarlocksYou should always be soulstoned so you can start healing soon after a death, in addition in can be quite usefull if you find a warlock to spam lifetap even if he doesnt need the mana, in order to get heals in when noone else needs to be healed.

Priests & PaladinsIn order to reduce the healing you do you can tell them "Your cleanse /dispel is a little slow" hopefully this will make them heal a bit less and have their finger hover over the dispel key or "Try not to overheal so much" even if they aren't overhealing, if you are an officer this works even better and will help keep the other healers from catching up with you. Sometimes this wont work so make sure to cancel buffs and whisper them all the time to rebuff you, this will keep them healing and lower their mana.

DruidsIf the enemy curses try to convince your raid leader that you need mages dps, and just make druids full time de-curse duty, druids have pretty slow heal so you can beat them easily with flash. If you see a druid HoT someone quickly flash heal them and then the druid will not only be denied healing but he will get a load of overheal. These tips can help you become a better raid healer than druids. Again cancelling and asking for buffs can be quite usefull to keep their mana drained.

ShamanTry to heal 1-2 people near the shaman at all times, this will help make their healing wave overheal more often. If you macro some questions , like "I would to talk to you about your spec for a moment" and use them as an officer you can also interrupt their healing.

LootObviously you need good gear to maintain a high healing position, loot councils work best with you as a coucil member or a loot master if you are the guild leader, try to create an argument for gearing up a "maintank healer" first which basically means you get most of the healing items, if someone complains remind them of your #1 position as the best healer, and then remark to your officers that that person isn't a very good player. If someone is consiently doing well and possibly threatening your healing position you can stir up some drama and try to get them kicked ( I am not an expert on drama so you'll have to find another guide for that) . If someone wants to know why they were kicked just say they were a poor healer and didn't live up to the standards of the guild ( they had a low heal ranking).

Remember everything here will help you get a higher heal ranking. The higher a ranking of a healer, the more likely they are doing these things to increase their ranking, Good Luck!

10
comments:

Anonymous
said...

Very funny, and possibly a little bit sad since I am sure there are people who actually play like this, and guilds that make decisions on players based on artificial and flawed measures. Fortunately my main is a tank, so I don't have to worry too much about my ranking on the damage meter. I've seen the problems dps obsessed warriors can cause, though, when a player doesn't understand the potential problems of a trying to be a dps class without any aggro mitigation talents.

My main is a mage and I would always get bitched at for not being top of the DPS meter; however, I was the only mage that came prepared to hand out food / water, I always helped provide the mats needed for FR pots, and I always casted the correct spell on the correct mob. I was also usually the last mage standing.

The meters measure ONE statistic, not a player's overall ability. I could put a mentally challenged handicap kid in front of the keyboard spamming frostbolt in a teir 3 set and he would top the meter...

JESUS CHRIST. THIS POST MAKES ME SICK TO MY STOMACH. I should peckerslap you for even posting this nonsense. If you are a "new" healer and are looking for advice, DO NOT take it from this page. Do a google search for "wow priest healing" and click on any link that has "elitestjerks" in it. I'm not going to go into theorycrafting because I would be here all day, but I will say just a few things. First of all CoH priest and resto shamans will ALWAYS top the effective healing and overhealing meters due to their powerful raid healing abilities. If your guild is killing bosses and the tanks arent dying then you are doing your job, PERIOD. Rank1 GH is your friend, use it. If somone else tops your target off as your casting. Stopcasting. I use stopcast macros for all my healing spells minus instant cast spells. So hows that work you ask? I ALWAYS have some kind of heal comming down the pipe at all times. If my target is healed before my heal goes off I simply hit my macro which will stop my current cast and start another, I only let my heal go thru if its needed. This method will eliminate 90% of you overhealing. Flash Heal is very inefficient heal, use it on trash and in an emergency only. If you need to heal yourself use Binding Heal, because I gaurentee you that someone will also need healing as as well. Ok enough of my rambling, bottom line, dont listen to this guy. If you are useing max rank everything you seriously need to do some research on your class. You'll be glad you did. Good luck to all you Priest out there!